


Reading and Living

by Kare



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, I am strange like that, I wrote about people reading...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-26
Updated: 2018-03-26
Packaged: 2019-04-08 15:50:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14108787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kare/pseuds/Kare
Summary: Steve uses the written word to come to grasp with the 21st century... and maybe to bond with Bucky...





	Reading and Living

For Steve it had started out as a life hack.

 

Watching Star Wars had turned into a complete disaster. Everyone kept referring back and forth withing the sage and at some point Steve had just about had it and sat down and read the entire thing. The visual effects in his own mind might have been less then sub par.

 

But it had been fun.

 

It had allowed him to grasp just what everyone had been talking about and it had allowed him to still be engrossed by the visuals when he finally saw the real deal.

 

This might have been a compromise.

 

Or an attempt to reduce Tony’s way too many insults.

 

By the time Rogue One had hit the screens… Steve would not have called himself a fan. He had a different reference frame to the people who had grown up with these movies…

 

But it kinda felt wrong to not own and read the novelization anyway, even if Tony had ensured that all of them had seen a pre-pre-pre premier of the movie way before anyone else.

 

* * *

 

 

One of the strangest things Steve had ever read was probably Buckys file.

 

Steve knew, on an intellectual level, that this was real. He had seen Bucky. He had fought him. They had talked, even if it hadn’t been much of a conversation.

 

But it didn’t feel _real_.

 

Much like the whole sleeping for decades and waking up in a world that was mightily advanced but still not as awesome as it could have been. (Yes, Steve was still sour about the flying cars. Sure enough, there were flying suits. Tonys flying suits. But it just wasn’t the same. Much like Sams Jetpack wasn’t the same.)

 

Some thing were just easier to file away, shrug at and label it as just one of these things.

 

Steve had gotten eerily good at that.

 

But it wasn’t quiet the same as understanding.

 

Steve had never been able to wrap his head around the fact that Howard, who had had an almost child like enthusiasm for most of anything, could turn out to be a horrible father.

 

He could wrap his head around Peggy, he had wanted her to be happy after all.

 

But to understand that Bucky - his Bucky - had turned into… it was wrong to chide him for being a good sniper, after all this fact had saved Steves life more then once. But to think that Bucky had… even changed was too strong a word, after all Steve wanted to believe that the old Bucky was still in there somewhere.

 

And Steve was able to recite the whole thing by heart. Of course he was.

 

But the feeling of reading something so… the surreal edge never completely went away.

 

So when Tony asked whether or not Steve had known.

 

Of course had had read it.

 

But until that moment he had unable to emotionally connected any of that to the 21st century…

 

* * *

 

 

It had been ridiculously expensive and complicated, but eventually Steve had hunted down the rest of the Hardy Boys series - the original and the re-written ones.

 

Mainly because he only notices the re-write after he started reading his new found haul.

 

Steve had even employed the help of Coulson to figure out where to find outdated things, even if he had been careful not to mention just what he had been searching for.

 

Steve was halfway sure that the information had ended up in some file anyway.

 

It had been a sobering experience.

 

One just can’t re-capture ones childhood, no matter how much one tries.

 

So despite the price tag and the fact that Steve had read every single book, his collection collected dust in one of the way to many warehouses which was storing things under one of his way to many pseudonyms.

 

 

 

It was another story entirely, when they finally decided to get Bucky into the swing of the 21st century.

 

Steve knew that Bucky had mainly braved Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter and even Game of Thrones, because Stark insisted.

 

There would never be a gesture grand enough to apologize for the past.

 

But if the man insisted, that something just had to be known, Bucky usually went out of his way to humor Stark.

 

This had somehow lead to Bucky unearthing additional books of the Harry Potter series. Okay, not ones written by J.K. Rowling. But Steve refused to fuss about details.

 

And Steve knew that he could have sat down, learn Russian, ask Bucky for the books and read them himself… which may or may not have been another disappointment in the making.

 

Instead he had brought pillows, blankets and snacks and had curled up at Buckys feet, resting his head on Buckys knee and waiting thing out.

 

It had taken Bucky three hours to realize that just maybe Steve was not only here for a head scratch.

 

It was another hour before Steve asked ever so sleepily what had happened this far.

 

Bucky had tensed, almost panicked, at the prospect of summing up about 300+ pages.

 

But Steve had just snuggled closer, promising “In your own time.”


End file.
